This paper examines the relationship between communication on a firm's purpose between a team leader and individual team members (referred to as "purpose dialogue") and the resulting levels of team commitment. We hypothesize that increased dialogue about purpose will lead to higher team commitment by enhancing consensus on the team's tasks and objectives, a relationship moderated negatively by the variation of leader-member exchange quality and positively by the autonomy given by leaders to individual team members. Using data from 469 firms and 57,440 individual observations, we find support for our hypotheses across different contexts.

This paper studies employees’ reactions to corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) sanctions by studying employees’ commitment post CSiR. Relying on the Social Identity Theory and using turnover as proxy for employee commitment, I hypothesize that employees are less committed to their firm after it is sanctioned for CSiR as they attempt to protect their own identity from the sanctioned firm’s negative features. In addition, firms with more explicit corporate purpose statements face more employee scrutiny. With data from the 10K annual reports, Compustat, Reprisk, and Violation Tracker (US), I find that employee commitment is weaker when a firm is sanctioned for its irresponsible actions and that corporate purpose strengthens this relationship in firms with low reputation risk.

In this work, we aim to study the influence of a firm's purpose in the targeting and sanctioning of firms in the context of misconduct.